If you haven't been keeping up with the news lately you'd notice that the obsidian shuffle is going to be nerfed even further when patch 4.2 hits. According to Joystiq.com and their new article the new vendor price for uncut green gems has been changed to 50s.

What will happen to the obsidian shuffle? For one, people will learn to adapt, but I can definitely see the casual jewelcrafters panicking and possibly leaving the market alone for quite some time. The ore market will likely crash and I'm sure we can expect to see people swap to gathering herbs instead of gather ore after this patch. This new update brings the new vendor price for obsidian ore at 15g per stack.

I did some articles back in the past, I'm not going to rewrite them, but instead relink them to you. It's the same content, same idea, the obsidian shuffle gets nerfed and I'm sure what the outcome is going to be.

One thing that I do want to toss out there: get rid of any heavenly shards before 4.2. People will most likely catch onto how to craft & obtain some cost effective heavenly shards once 4.2 hits as they'll want to squeeze as much profit as possible from their ore.

What do you think will happen to the obsidian shuffle in 4.2? Will it still be worth doing? Will the enchanting material market crash due to a high supply & low-medium demand?

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comments: on "Obsidian Shuffle Nerfed Even Further"

Perhaps Im missing something from patch notes but why would people suddenly catch on to how to produce heavenly shards with the coming of 4.2? Do you mean that simply because their ore will become worthless, they will look for alternatives to move it and hence discover how to make shards?

Perhaps this may be a rather in-depth disscussion, but I imagine many of us would benefit from an article that reviews how bliss has changed the shuffle since the xpansion launched. I'd offer to put one together myself but I'm new to shuffling and am still trying to get a handle on the current.

Supposedly a new jc ring in 4.2 made from the blue rare? If so, I think this is where cheap shards will come from as their isnt much else to use the zephyrite/rare on is their? Of course, you will need an alch and an enchanter aswell as a jc to pull this off though. I'm probably wrong but it was a random chat I had with guildies upon hearing the news :)

The real floor price is 17g is you get an even distribution of gems. I know for a fact that you won't and it will never happen thus I lowered the "floor price" by 15% to equate for some of the randomness. I used the same equation as you @annon below scott.

But the vendor shuffle doesn't rely on combinations of different gems, so the average value is unaffected by differing amounts of each gem.

For something like Darkmoon cards, or metagems, there would be an average loss due to certain gems showing up less frequently than others, and the 15% would be appropriate.

The proper way to compute the value using metagems, if we had the time, would be to calculate all of the possible ways that n gems could be divided up among the 6 colors, and multiply their likelihood against their value to compute the average.

But since all of the recipes to make vendorable items are using separate gems, there's no loss due to a random distribution.

Granted, a stack of obsidium might only create 4 Zephrites, but it's equally likely to produce 8 Carnelians. The average is over 17g.

This is all academical, because the price of enchanting mats would have to plummet before it is worth vendoring everything. When the price of 4 dust plus 1 G Essence drops below 20g, it'll be time to make a more detailed analysis, including finding out the likelihood of rare jewelry. Until then, DE everything.

I know this doesn't give you a "floor" for the ore's value, but you can set a realistic floor-like value by setting minimal values for dust and essences.

For example, on my server, I've seen dust dip below 3g once in the last few months. I can sell as much dust as I want (barring undercutting bots) for more than 3g, making 3g a vendor-like price. If I wished to be conservative, I could have used 2g. Using these prices, we can set a value for a stack of ore on a server-by-server basis.

I did all of the math (ignoring rare-procs when making the jewelry) in the post mentioned above.

No change at all. Farmers still farmed when saronite got down to 15g. Elementium will be no different. Even if it does drop down to 15g, they will still farm, jcs will still cut, and shuffle. The only thing that would make big waves is if they finally did something to make those dammed zeph's profitable.

If I was a betting man, I would guess this bliz's 2-fold solution. Get rid of the last bots out there , and push out some people out of the market( before epic gems hit. Everyone going to jump ship when the price drops, then try to get back when epic gems come back, but it will be too late. Model is almost the same as BC.

Anon is correct because i dont see gold farmers just suddenly stop farming. The way i can see it is alot of them use a bot and so if they are botting then their GPH or ROI is pretty much unnecessary to calculate. Now sure this might hit the legit farmers harder, but honestly they will just have to get creative besides just throwing ore in the AH and hoping jcers will buy it out. Even so personally when this patch hits ill just have to hold on to my zeph till i need shadowspirit diamonds, or hopefully learn of a new recipe that will allow us to make a trinket or something thats green(even if its bop its good for DEing). I can see some might think to transmute them to ocean sapphire for patch 4.2 for pvp necklaces and rings, but any serious shuffler will have stockpiles of this already and maybe even pushing some already in the form of spirit cuts or stamina cuts.

I actually see SSDs dropping in price as a result, too. Since the value of gems is going to decrease with the decrease in the cost of ore, so too will SSDs as a result. Does that mean I should cut my 60+ SSDs into various metas and try to sell them before the price plummets? I paid 32g for the elementium ore stacks. :/

All in all, though, the real "floor" is, as someone said, what dust and essences average out to. You shouldn't be vendoring gems since the nerf from 9g anyway. Even at a loss for some of the jewellery to DE, it should average out in the long run. Sure, ore prices are going to drop; but we will still shuffle and feed enchants and enchanting mats into the market.

After patch 4.1 ore prices didn't collapse on our server like you predicted, on the contrary the prices went up 25%. So I guess there are only few people on our server (Bloodscalp EU) doing the shuffle. I expect the same when 4.2 is gonna hit us.

imo carnelian for spikes and orange gems for transmute still make the shuffle relatively lucrative, at least in the short term, and presuming no epic gems for a bit (which i would imagine will kill the ember topazes). Heck, nowadays I sell my ember topazes for more than inferno rubies.